Ross, Miss Lily

Ross, Miss Lily, 11 Highfield Terrace, Ilfracombe

Lily Margaret Agnes Ross[1] (1893 – 1982) was born on 10 Mar 1893, the daughter of Captain William Ross, a master mariner, and his wife Elizabeth. By the time of Lily’s birth the family had moved to 1 Moorland Terrace, St Jude’s, Plymouth. In 1891, with William away at sea and Lily’s brother William at boarding school, the household consisted of Elizabeth, Edith aged 10, Lily aged 8 and Frances aged 4, together with a resident servant.

The family moved to Ilfracombe some time during the 1900s. A Mrs Ross is recorded participating in various community organisations, the Ilfracombe Women’s Liberal Association, the YMCA and the Ilfracombe United Temperance Council.[2] While there was another Ross family in the town, these form a cluster of interests that predict pro-suffrage activity.

In the 1911 census Lily Ross, aged 18, is listed with her mother and sister Frances, living at 11 Highfield Terrace. She is described as a ‘student’, but a different hand has written beside this ‘Post Office’. This possibly indicates that she was studying to pass the entry examination for Post Office employment. Lily’s sister Edith is not listed on the census either with the family or, apparently, elsewhere, which may indicate that she had decided to absent herself on census night as a ‘census resister’. She was evidently still part of the family, as she married in the Baptist Church at Ilfracombe in 1914, an event for which her bridal veil was embroidered by Lily.[3]

On July 30 1912 L.M. Ross (Lily) wrote a letter published in the North Devon Journal about the defeat of the Conciliation Bill in Parliament and subsequent developments.[4] She wrote in support of a letter published the previous week, written by Constance Mortlock-Brown of Braunton. She quoted a letter written by Mr Brailsford and published in the Manchester Guardian on July 27th, in which Brailsford had explained the intransigence of the Irish MPs who voted against it en bloc, even though one of them had sponsored it. This was a move in the struggle for Irish Home Rule, and designed to prop up the Liberal Government and avoid embarrassing them by a vote for women’s suffrage. Ross ended her letter: ‘And yet the Constitutional Suffragists are ready to trust to Government promises! Save us from our friends, say we of the WSPU.’

Ross and Annie Ball (q.v.) took a shop for the WSPU during the spring of 1913. At 2 High Street, Ilfracombe, they held a three-week exhibition of Suffrage Posters, and they also used the shop as the venue for a debate and for a fund-raising jumble sale.[5] There are further references to Lily Ross’s support for the branch in Breaking the Mould.[6] These are awaiting detailed referencing.

It seem that Ross succeeded in passing examinations qualifying her for employment in the Civil Service, as she is recorded on the 1939 Register as a ‘civil servant’ living at 248 Muswell Road, Hornsey. She died on 14 April 1982 at 34 Hutton Road, Shenfield with an estate not exceeding £25,000.

 

 

Entry created by Julia Neville, December 2018


[1] Census and family information from www.ancestry.co.uk

[2] North Devon Journal (NDJ), 17 Nov 1910, 8 Dec 1911, 31 Oct 1912.

[3] NDJ, 6 Aug 1914.

[4] NDJ, 1 Aug 1912.

[5] The Suffragette, 18 April 1913, 451.

[6] Pamela Vass, Breaking the Mould: the Suffragette Story in North Devon, Bideford, Boundstone Books, 2017, 139.

 

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